The Division of Labor in Society

Summary

Revised for the first time in over thirty years, this edition of Emile Durkheim’s masterful work on the nature and scope of sociology is updated with a new introduction and improved translation by leading scholar Steven Lukes that puts Durkheim’s work into context for the twenty-first century reader.

When it was originally published, The Division of Labor in Society was an entirely original work on the nature of labor and production as they were being shaped by the industrial revolution. Emile Durkheim’s seminal workstudies the nature of social solidarity and explores the ties that bind one person to the next in order to hold society together.

This revised and updated second edition fluently conveys Durkheim’s arguments for contemporary readers. Leading Durkheim scholar Steve Lukes’s new introduction builds upon Lewis Coser’s original—which places the work in its intellectual and historical context and pinpoints its central ideas and arguments. Lukes explains the text’s continued significance as a tool to think about and deal with problems that face us today. The original translation has been revised and reworked in order to make Durkheim’s arguments clearer and easier to read.

The Division of Labor in Society is an essential resource for students and scholars hoping to deepen their understanding of one of the pioneering voices in modern sociology and twentieth-century social thought.

Chapter III: Solidarity Arising from the Division of Labor, or Organic Solidarity

Chapter IV: Another Proof of the Preceding Theory

Chapter V: The Increasing Preponderance of Organic Solidarity and Its Consequences

Chapter VI: The Increasing Preponderance of Organic Solidarity and Its Consequences (cont.)

Chapter VII: Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity

Book II The Causes and Conditions

Chapter I: The Progress of the Division of Labor and of Happiness

Chapter II: The Causes

Chapter III: Secondary Factors

Chapter IV: Secondary Factors (cont.)

Chapter V: Consequences of the Foregoing

Book III The Abnormal Forms

Chapter I: The Anomic Division of Labor

Chapter II: The Forced Division of Labor

Chapter III: Another Abnormal Form

Conclusion

Original Annotated Table of Contents

About David Emile Durkheim and Steven Lukes

Index

Preface to This Edition

Steven Lukes

The story of English translations of Durkheim’s major works has not been an especially happy one. The earliest translations—of Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1915), The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim 1933), and The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1938)—were defective, sometimes seriously so.¹ Of course there is always room for dispute over what constitutes success in translation, but these translations contained just too many straightforward errors, slips, and misunderstandings to be counted as reliable (which did not prevent their being influential upon, and sometimes misleading, generations of anglophone students and scholars). The situation in all three cases has much improved, with Karen Fields’s excellent rendering of Elementary Forms in 1995, together with a wonderfully insightful and reflective introduction to that great work, and with the publication, in 1982 and 1984 respectively, of W. D. Halls’s translations of The Rules and The Division. But perfection in translation is an inherently elusive goal, in part because of the need for innumerable contestable decisions² (should one, for instance, respect the author’s unclarities and ambiguities or help the reader by plumping for precision?) and in part because the barriers separating a past author from present readers tend to rise up with time and generational change (so should the translator try to lower them?).

The present edition of The Division of Labor, which includes a chronology of Durkheim’s life and works and suggestions for further reading, offers the reader a revised translation of that published in 1984. The original French volume of De la division du travail social (second edition), published in 1902, of which this is a translation, contained, according to the convention of the time, an extended table of contents. This is included here, following the text of the book, in order further to aid readers in navigating the text. That translation has been carefully revised throughout. I want here to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Raphaelle Thery, who meticulously checked the entire translation. One merely verbal change is to reverse Dr. Halls’s decision to render "sanctions restitutives as restitutory rather than restitutive" sanctions, in view of the universal usage of the latter in the ever more voluminous literature on Durkheim. Minor inaccuracies and mistakes have been corrected in what is, overall, a fine, reliable, readable translation. Among other adjustments, where the French text is precise, ambiguity in the English has been disambiguated; where the French is ambiguous, the English has retained the ambiguity. The overall goal has been to capture subtleties and nuances that eluded the 1984 edition.

Lewis Coser’s introduction to that edition has been retained. Its success is due to the author’s characteristic gifts for deftly placing this, Durkheim’s first major book and sociology’s first classic, within the history of ideas, relating it to relevant intellectual traditions and thinkers; for lucidly outlining its central claims and sociological insights; and for suggesting where its main strengths and weaknesses lie. The uninitiated reader will doubtless find it worthwhile to read it alongside Coser’s fine chapter on Durkheim in his Masters of Sociological Thought (Coser 2003).

The new introduction to this edition takes a different tack, focusing on the ways in which this work is of present-day sociological interest. It notes the manner in which it deploys Durkheim’s still controversial methodological rules, subsequently set out in his The Rules of Sociological Method published two years later. It examines the continuing significance of Durkheim’s theory, as expressed here and modified later, concerning the nature of and conditions for social solidarity in ever more complex and differentiated societies. It outlines the central role its arguments have played in the sociology of crime and punishment,³ and it offers a discussion of the distinctive approach Durkheim adopts here to the practice of social critique and the limitations, which he himself later began to discern, under the influence, it seems, of his nephew Marcel Mauss, of its methodological nationalism.

The edition here translated is the second edition of De la division du travail social, which was published in 1902. It differed from the first edition of 1893 in two respects. It included a new Preface entitled Quelques remarques sur les groupements professionels, which is translated and included here. It also excluded a section of the Introduction to the first edition. Durkheim decided to discard this, as he explains in two footnotes to this edition. The first, in the Preface, reads: We have confined ourselves to eliminating from the original Introduction some thirty pages, which now appear to us to be of no value. We also explain the reasons for the omission at the place where it occurs. And later in the Introduction there is a second footnote, which reads: In the first edition of this book, we developed at length the reasons which, in our view, prove the sterility of this method [i.e., of the moral philosophers]. Today we believe that we can be more brief. There are arguments that should not be indefinitely prolonged. There speaks the new professor at the Sorbonne, confident that sociology had made sufficient headway to cease to be defensive vis-à-vis the philosophers. Yet, despite Durkheim’s negative view of these pages, they should in my view be made available in English to anyone interested in Durkheim’s (developing) views of the science of morality, of which they contain his first systematic statement, soon to be modified and improved in The Rules and later essays. This was, after all, his central preoccupation, the center and end, as his collaborator George Davy wrote, of his work (Davy 1920: 71). We have therefore made them available online translated by Karen Fields at http://www.durkheim-division-of-labor-in-society.com.

Notes

1. The worst example is the omission from the Solovay and Mueller translation of The Rules (Durkheim 1938) of an entire paragraph, about structural or morphological facts forming the substratum of collective life, that is essential to the argument of the first chapter of The Rules and indeed to understanding the development of Durkheim’s thought. For a list of the more egregious mistranslations in The Rules and The Division, see appendix to Lukes 1968. For discussions of Swain’s translation of Elementary Forms see Fields’s introduction to Durkheim 1995 and Fields 2005. For a general discussion of these issues see Lukes 2012.

2. The situation regarding Durkheim’s Suicide differs from that of the other three works cited. Here the earlier translation (Durkheim 1951) is adequate and serviceable, whereas the new translation, though generally accurate and easy to read, makes bad decisions, translating égoisme throughout as egotism, which suggests selfishness, whereas Durkheim intended isolation and detachment, which egoism (used in the earlier translation) allows. It also specifies the meaning of Durkheim’s société—a term he notoriously left undefined—in different ways at different points, thereby masking Durkheim’s uncertainty and unclarity as to the meaning of this crucial word.

3. For a fuller discussion, see the editors’ introduction to Lukes and Scull 2013.

Introduction to the 1984 Edition

I

Lewis Coser

Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, his doctoral dissertation and his first major work, was published in 1893. Though a previous translation into English appeared in 1933, the present volume is the first exact, adequate, and satisfying translation of this key work.

The Division of Labor is a highly original treatment of the subject, yet it should be read within the context of earlier attempts to come to grips with the complex division of labor that emerged with the industrial revolution, first in England and then on the Continent. What is novel in Durkheim’s thought can best be understood if one refers, even if only sketchily, to previous attempts to define and come to grips with the emergence of an unprecedented system of production and the allocation of both productive and other societal tasks in the late eighteenth century.

Some forms of the division of labor, be it only along sexual lines, have characterized all known types of society from the primitive to the modern. In all of them, certain types of labor, but also of other functions, were allocated to specific groups of people. Even in the smallest known human societies there are some forms of human differentiation in the allocation of tasks and roles.

Medieval society and its characteristic thinkers were well aware of the diversity of work activities in their midst, and writings on the differences among such callings took prominent place among the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century and after. But the premodern division of labor involved, by and large, either divisions between urban artisans and rural folk who were involved in specific trades and occupations or rough class divisions between the members of the various estates that together made up premodern society. Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers fashioned products of a different nature and were socially visible in the pursuit of these different occupational ways of life. On the other hand, there were sharp divisions between those devoted to military affairs, people who were following a religious calling, and those, the great majority, who labored in the fields or in urban occupations.

A qualitative sea change in the character of the division of labor—a change from relative simplicity to rapidly advancing complexity—occurred, though adumbrations can be found much earlier, only with the beginning of the industrial revolution, first in the latter part of the eighteenth century in England and soon after in the rest of Europe and in America.

The emerging industrial form of production involved the gradual replacement of an artisanal mode of production, that is, a division of labor in which a particular producer, sometimes with the assistance of a few others, fashioned a whole product, by a mode of production based on a much finer differentiation of tasks and activities than previously. The products of the new industrial system were no longer created by individual craftsmen or by the collaboration of a few, but emerged instead from the coordinated activities of a large number of persons who had been assigned specialized tasks. The final product was the result of the integration of the work of a great number of workers who were submitted to overall discipline and coordination—be it by the tyranny of the clock, by the constraints of supervisors, or by mechanical rhythms. Moreover, the diversification of economic tasks was paralleled in the modern era by differentiation in many other spheres, in government as well as in the law, in the sciences as well as in legal institutions.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was the first major work that attempted to come to grips with this revolutionary development not only in the productive system but in the general character of social living. What characterized the dawning world of modern industry, so Smith argued, was above all the enormous increase in productivity that the new industrial division of labor brought in its wake. The combined labors of a number of specialized workers could now produce many more products in a specified number of hours than any single worker could have produced under the older system of production. The new division of labor, so Smith argued, could become an enormous boon to humanity by raising living standards to a degree simply unimaginable in previous days. Moreover, if previous barriers to commerce and exchange, both within given countries and in international trade, were removed so that goods could be produced in the economically most favored locations, the new national and international division of labor would add further gains of productivity to those already achieved in the workplace.

It would be unduly simplifying Smith’s thought were one to overlook the fact that although he concentrated attention on the beneficial effects of the new division of labor, he was also concerned about some of its deleterious consequences. What would become of people, Smith asked, who would throughout their lives perform the same number of simple tasks over and over again? Would this not lead to the deterioration of their mental faculties? How could one expect overspecialized workers to develop a sense of citizenship and a devotion to the commonweal? Yet, in contrast to many radical as well as conservative thinkers who followed in his wake, Smith remained basically optimistic about the benefits that the new mode of production would bring. Surely the great majority of readers carried from their reading of The Wealth of Nations an exhilarating sense of the bounties of the world to come. Vastly increased productive capacities would raise the level of human happiness to previously undreamed of degrees.

However, only a few decades after Smith had published his work, dissenting voices began to be heard in England as well as on the Continent. The underdevelopment of human capacities that Smith had dealt with only as a kind of afterthought became now a mainstay of critical reaction. The critics argued, to quote from the historian J. G. A. Pocock, that society as an engine for the production and multiplication of goods was inherently hostile to society as the moral foundation of personality (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 501). The new division of labor, argued Carlyle as well as many English romantics, when it began to be applied in the satanic mills of the new industrial age, stultified individual human beings and atrophied individual capacities. Human beings became anesthetized cogs in a vast productive apparatus. Roughly at the same time, German thinkers from Schiller to Hegel or Fichte, though writing in a country that was as yet hardly touched by the industrial revolution, echoed British thinkers and wrathfully castigated the new division of labor that could only lead to the emergence of stunted human beings who would no longer be able to develop full and autonomous personalities.

These critical voices found their culminating expression in the work of Karl Marx, who argued that, at least in its capitalist form, the new industrial division of labor alienated human beings from the products of their labor, from their work, as well as from their fellows, and even from themselves. Marx and many other critics, were prepared to agree with Smith that productivity under the new system had enormously increased, but they were intent upon showing that, at least under current conditions, these gains were accompanied by enormous human costs. The new mode of production, they argued, was inhuman in its consequences. A system that Smith had believed to bring great increments in human happiness had in fact resulted perversely in enormous increases in human misery and degradation. The human beings now bound to the Ixion’s wheel of the modern factory had become suffering victims instead of happy beneficiaries of the new division of labor.

The debate between the defenders and the antagonists of the new system of industrial production was carried on throughout most of the nineteenth century, and though individual voices can surely be distinguished, the general terms of the debate remained largely unaltered. It was the great merit of Emile Durkheim to renew the debate by largely eschewing the discussions of the past about productivity versus alienation, and putting a largely novel perspective before his audience.

Writing over a century after Adam Smith, Durkheim was no longer concerned with the productive gains made by the new division of labor, nor was he much concerned with what Marx had called alienation, although he was indeed perturbed by what he called the pathological consequences of the abnormal conditions of the contemporary division of labor. What concerned Durkheim above everything else were questions that had hardly been raised by his predecessors, though there are anticipations of his thought among such thinkers as Auguste Comte or Saint-Simon. What were the consequences of a complex and advanced system of the division of labor on the cohesion and solidarity of societies? And, more important still, how could the autonomy of the individual, to which Durkheim was passionately attached, be reconciled with the necessary regulation and discipline that were required to maintain social order in modern differentiated types of societies? How, in other words, could social bonds be maintained and reinforced without submitting individuals to the distasteful guidance of tutelary institutions that would repress human autonomy and individuality?

Durkheim saw himself as a dispassionate scientific student of society. Yet he was also strongly concerned with social reform. As he put it, because what we propose to study is above all reality, it does not follow that we should give up the idea of improving it. We would esteem our research not worth the labor of a single hour if its interest were merely speculative (p. 4). At the time of writing The Division of Labor, Durkheim placed himself in the tradition of positivism at the same time as he was far removed from the laissez-faire positivism of many nineteenth-century English and Continental thinkers. His positivism, just like that of Auguste Comte, was intended to prepare the ground for active social intervention.

Durkheim was a political liberal with pronounced melioristic as well as conservative sentiments. Though beholden to the idea of progress, he was equally concerned with the conditions that made social order possible. In this respect resembling Max Weber, Durkheim wanted to enhance the autonomy of the individual even as he clung to the idea that such autonomy could be attained only upon secure foundations in conditions of social solidarity firmly binding its members to each other. To put the question in his own words:

The question that has been the starting point for our study has been that of the connection between the individual personality and social solidarity. How does it come about that the individual, whilst becoming more autonomous, depends ever more closely upon society? How can he become at the same time more of an individual and yet more linked to society? . . . It has seemed to us that what resolved this apparent antinomy was the transformation of social solidarity which arises from the ever-increasing division of labor. (p. 7)

In order to clarify the dialectical relations between social solidarity in the modern industrial world and personal autonomy, or, as he called it, the cult of the individual, Durkheim attempted systematically to distinguish the type of solidarity prevalent in relatively simple societies from that to be found in the modern world. He called the first mechanical solidarity and the second organic solidarity. This twofold distinction was in tune with much nineteenth-century thought. Spencer’s distinction between military and industrial societies, Maine’s societies based on status as against those based on contract, and, above all, Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have obvious similarities with Durkheim’s concepts. Yet his divergencies from these thinkers are at least as pronounced as their similarities. To Spencer as well as to Maine the general trend of human evolution was marked by the gradual decline of societal regulation and the emergence of unfettered individualism. On the other hand, as has been seen, Durkheim was convinced that without stable social bonds, without social solidarity, individualism would lead to the decay of society. Yet he felt equally uncongenial to Tönnies and other German thinkers who argued that true solidarity could exist only in village communities of the past and that the breath of modernity undermined what these thinkers conceived to be the only true solidary societal formation, the now decayed or decaying Gemeinschaft.

Despite their divergencies, Durkheim and the other thinkers faced a common question: If preindustrial societies were held together by common values, sentiments, and norms, equally shared by all, what held modern societies together, given the fact that the modern forms or organization and production had made people unlike each other and hence no longer susceptible to solidarities and regulations encompassing everyone with equal vigor?

Spencer and Maine believed that freely engaged contracts between individuals were gradually replacing now largely obsolete solidarities and regulations. In one of the main contentions of his work, Durkheim objected that individual contracts could not lay the foundation of a social order and that, to the contrary, contracts could be engaged in only on the basis of an already existing moral order. The contract is not sufficient by itself, but is possible only because of the regulation of contracts, which is of social origin (p. 169). In other words, contracts presuppose social order—they cannot serve as its foundation. The social order has primacy over individually motivated actions. The individualistic-utilitarian solution to the problem of social order in modern societies leads to an impasse.

Durkheim did not only limit himself to documenting that contracts between individuals could not, as such, form the basis of social cohesion. He went further and asserted that the modern type of individual, far from being an existential given, was in fact a historically emergent, a societal creation. In fact, if in lower societies so little place is allowed for the individual personality, he argued, "it is not that it has been constricted or suppressed artificially, it is quite simply because at that moment in history it did not exist" (p. 151). The whole matter is once again put in a nutshell when Durkheim argued in an endnote:

We believe this is sufficient to answer those who think that they can prove that in social life everything is individual, because society is made up only of individuals. Undoubtedly no other substratum exists. But because individuals form a society, new phenomena occur whose cause is association, and which, reacting upon the consciousness of individuals, for the most part shapes them. This is why, although society is nothing without individuals, each one of them is more a product of society than he is the author. (p. 274)

Durkheim was equally opposed to the German train of thought, best exemplified by the work of Tönnies, which claimed that true solidarity could exist only in relatively undifferentiated societies in which the sense of individuality had not yet corroded the social fabric. Tönnies’s dyspeptic picture of the present and his glorification of an undivided past, Durkheim argued, were rooted in the assumption that the maintenance of social bonds could be achieved only when social differentiation was at a minimum. Yet it was a fact, Durkheim believed, that while mechanical solidarity could indeed thrive only where human beings were engaged in essentially similar activities, organic solidarity could develop from spontaneously arising consensus between individual actors who, just because they were engaged in different roles and tasks, were dependent on one another. While mechanical solidarity was founded upon likeness, organic solidarity arose because of complementarity between actors engaged in different pursuits.

To summarize: it is not the decay of social solidarity, as both the British and the German thinkers assumed, that marked the transition from relatively simple to relatively complex societies in Durkheim’s eyes. Rather there emerged a new type of solidarity in the world of modernity once the relatively simple societies of the past had given way to the complex world of an elaborate division of labor.

What then accounted for the evolutionary transition from the rigid social controls and uniform beliefs and sentiments of societies based on mechanical solidarity to the societies of organic solidarity where each element operates more independently and is not simply a miniature image or an appendage of the collective body? Here Durkheim advanced an essentially Darwinian argument. As in the course of human evolution the density of settlement increases not only because the number of individuals in a given territory increases but also because, partly as a consequence, the number of interactions between individuals increases, there is need for specialization of activities so as to increase productivity. Specialization is required if a greater number of interacting individuals are forced to ensure their livelihood on a given territory.

Still beholden, as were many of his contemporaries, to biological analogies, Durkheim argued that the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity might profitably be compared to the changes that appeared on the evolutionary scale. Relatively simple organisms, showing only minimal degrees of internal differentiation, cede place to more highly differentiated organisms whose functional specialization allows them to exploit more efficiently the resources of the ecological niche in which they happen to be placed. The more specialized the functions of an organism, the higher its level on the evolutionary scale, and the higher its survival value. In similar ways, the more differentiated a society, the higher its chances to exploit the maximum of available resources, and hence the higher its efficiency in procuring indispensable means of subsistence in a given territory.

Having located the basic differences between modern and simpler societies in the differing forms of solidarity that they exhibit, Durkheim was then moved to indicate how it was possible to distinguish between mechanical and organic solidarity even though such moral phenomena were evidently not measurable directly. Searching for an indicator of types of solidarity, Durkheim turned to the study of legal codes. He asserted that legal regulations, that is, rules of conduct that are sanctioned, can be roughly divided into two major types: repressive sanctions, which are characteristic of penal law and involve punishment for transgressions and deviance; and restitutive sanctions, which, in contrast, do not rely on punishment but rather rely on righting of a balance upset by the violation. Repressive laws come into play when deviance is termed a crime, while restitutive laws set up the moral obligation to recompense claimants who have been injured. Most civil and commercial law is restitutive in character, whereas most criminal law is based on penal sanctions.

The predominance of penal or restitutive law in given societies, Durkheim argued, could serve as an index of the type of society, or the type of solidarity under consideration. Societies based on mechanical solidarity relied almost exclusively on penal sanctions. What was punished was departure from the collective way of life, the shared values and beliefs of the society. Any action that was perceived as an infringement of the collective consciousness—the shared mental and moral orientations of societies—was conceived as a crime and sanctioned accordingly. In modern societies, on the other hand, in which individuality, and hence the violation of individual rights, is central, restitutive rather than penal sanctions predominate.

As has been seen, Durkheim argued that the origin of the modern division of labor had to be looked for in the intensified struggle for existence that came into play once larger numbers of people in given territories engaged in denser forms of interaction and were therefore forced to specialize in order to survive. We have also noted that Durkheim argued, in contrast to his British and German contemporaries, that the modern organic division of labor did not necessarily bring deleterious consequences but could create bonds between autonomous individuals just as enduring and persistent as those that earlier had linked members of societies with mechanical solidarity enveloped by a common consciousness.

This brings us to an important aspect of Durkheim’s methodological views, namely that the origin of an institution does not explain its function. Organic social solidarity did not originate in order to enhance solidary bonds between individuals but was brought about by quite different causes. To Durkheim, causal inquiries have to be carried out separately from functional analyses. If today the modern division of labor serves the function of increasing solidarity through complementarity, it did not come into being for such reasons. Or, to take an example from Durkheim’s later work on religion, various religious systems may have very different historical causes and reasons for emergence. Yet all of them may serve the common function of drawing people together in devotion to religious symbols and rites that make them aware of their common dependence on the society of which they are a part.

At the time that Durkheim was writing The Division of Labor, he was, by and large, beholden to a structural explanation of moral phenomena. Restitutive law replaced penal law, he argued, as societies moved from morphological forms rooted in relationships between people having similar positions in the process of production to morphological forms characterized by higher degrees of dissimilarity. As people now engaged in differentiated societal tasks and work routines they developed new institutional relations and moral ideas. In other words, to use Marxian terminology for just a moment, different economic infrastructures produced different forms of superstructures. The essential differences between types of society were to be sought on the structural or morphological level. The causal arrow in the analysis of social phenomena went largely from productive relations and structural linkages between people to moral or legal systems of thought. The enlargement of the volume and density of a society caused new modes of the division of labor and this in turn found a reflection in legal and moral forms as well as in types of social bonds. In subsequent works, especially in those in which he investigated religious sentiments and practices in instructive detail, Durkheim was to move in a somewhat more idealistic direction by granting more autonomy to such ideational phenomena as religion. But such later shifts in his theoretical and analytical orientation need not obscure the fact that in The Division of Labor he is largely a structural analyst not as far removed from Marx as certain commentators have sometimes been inclined to think.

Another shift in Durkheim’s analytical approach at the time of writing The Division of Labor, and in subsequent works, needs to be mentioned. In the Division, the collective consciousness, a conception that Durkheim largely developed in derivation from Rousseau’s general will and Comte’s consensus, is conceived as the major cement that binds people in their mechanical solidarity. Indeed, the common consciousness, with its emphasis on the commonness of beliefs and sentiments, appears almost as the defining characteristic of societies grounded in mechanical solidarity. If this were the case, it would then appear as if in societies based on organic solidarity collective consciousness would inevitably decay. There are indeed several passages in the present work that seem strongly to suggest that Durkheim did believe this to be the case. In such passages he seems to feel that the common consciousness would largely be displaced by the mutual dependence of people engaged in different yet complementary rounds of life. Later works, however, largely correct this view. Such a correction is already presaged in the present pages; Durkheim stresses that although the collective consciousness in the world of modernity can no longer define the specific norms that pertain to the exercise of differentiated tasks, it is still needed so as to ensure overall coordination and integration of the society as a whole. Much of Durkheim’s later work can be read as a continuing effort to define the basis for a kind of civic religion which, through education and other means, would provide common values to societies otherwise characterized by a great variety of role- and task-specific norms and regulations. As Talcott Parsons has emphasized (see his Emile Durkheim in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York, Macmillan, 1968), to the mature Durkheim the sharing of common values is a constant feature of all systems at whatever level of differentiation.

I have commented so far exclusively on Books I and II of The Division of Labor, in which Durkheim argues with admirable logical rigor that in the course of evolutionary development different societies have moved from a basis in mechanical solidarity to one in organic solidarity. The reader is hence likely to react with initial shock when finding that in Book III, entitled The Abnormal Forms, Durkheim introduces considerations that seem to fit but poorly into the neat scheme explicated in earlier parts of the work. I shall argue that Durkheim may have lost some logical coherence with Book III, but that this loss of rigor is amply compensated for by an increase in realistic awareness of the blemishes of the social scene as they intruded on his vision when he observed the industrial world of the fin de siècle.

This world, Durkheim notes, is marred by a variety of pathological phenomena. Far from the parts of the whole being harmoniously adjusted to each other through complementarity, mutual dependence, and smooth adjustment, the industrial scene is in fact characterized, inter alia, by hostility and struggle between labor and capital, by commercial crises and the attending bankruptcies, by normlessness (anomie), lack of regulation, unrestricted play of individual or collective self-interest. Such conditions, far from being exceptional, can generally be found in the modern industrial and social world. Just as in Yeats’s great poem The Second Coming, the center does no longer seem to hold. Such an evaluation of the industrial world was, of course, widespread among social commentators toward the end of the nineteenth century. But initially one is surprised to find it coming from the pen of Emile Durkheim. He had argued insistently and repeatedly in his effort to distinguish normal from pathological phenomena that conditions generally found in a society represent the normal state of affairs. Suddenly it now turns out that what can indeed be found to be widespread general phenomena, such as class struggles and commercial crises, are nevertheless abnormal and pathological.

How then does Durkheim attempt to find a solution to this apparent impasse? How can he avoid the logical conclusion that the bleak picture he paints in Book III is the effect of the modern division of labor itself and hence the root cause of present disorders? Here he has recourse to certain ideas previously found in Saint-Simon as well as Auguste Comte. These authors had argued that in contemplating history one found two different types of societal arrangements. There were indeed organic periods in which the various social forces were harmoniously adjusted to each other, but there were also critical periods of transition that exhibited a variety of disorders in the body social. Critical periods brought a great deal of turmoil and human suffering in their wake but they also already contained new healthy forces that would in the long run right unbalanced conditions and lead to fresh adjustments. Durkheim largely followed this type of reasoning in Book III. He argued that, contrary to what has been said, the division of labor does not produce these [deleterious] consequences through some imperative of its own nature, but only in exceptional and abnormal circumstances (p. 290). If, for example, the modern worker seems to have a sense of being alienated from his work, this is not because alienation is inherent in modern modes of production but only because workers lack at the present time a sense of being engaged in a collective endeavor, a sense of spontaneously derived cooperation with their fellows and superiors. They do not feel at present that they are of some use and therefore feel indeed like cogs in a vast machine. The division of labor as one encounters it in modern industry is an abnormal division of labor, a division that springs not from spontaneity but from forceful imposition. When coercive constraints replace spontaneously given consent, the whole human enterprise is weakened.

Durkheim’s proposed remedies are in tune with his prognosis of the malady of modern societies. If coercion has primacy over spontaneous adjustments—if the division of economic functions produces a low degree of social cohesion and solidarity, if technical developments have outstripped the growth of an appropriate regulative apparatus—it behoves social scientists to warn decision makers that only the creation of new institutionalized moral bonds can prevent social decay through strife and the spreading of social disorder.

Though Durkheim was by no means averse to state intervention when it came to the imposition of new regulations to ameliorate the forced division of labor, his major recommendation for overcoming the present crisis did not involve state action. The state might one day move to abolish the hereditary transmission of property as a means to bring about a meritocratic society with equal opportunity for all. But state action was too far removed from the lives of ordinary men and women, and from the institutional setting of workplace and factory, to be of much utility in overcoming the contemporary anomic and forced division of labor. What was required here was the reemergence of secondary institutions,—a concept that had already been conceived by Tocqueville. What was meant was those institutions that were placed midway, so to speak, between the remote world of the state’s powers and the concrete everyday world of the individual. Taking his clues from his study of Roman and medieval, largely artisanal, corporations, Durkheim argued in the preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor for a revival of a new corporatism.

Durkheim envisaged that in the various industrial branches throughout the country new types of corporations would be instituted in which both employers and employees of each specific branch would be represented. The administrative council of these corporations would have the power to regulate labor relations, wages and salaries, conditions of work, appointments, and promotions, as well as relations with other branches of industry and with governmental authorities. There would be a central administrative council for a given branch of industry as well as local or regional bodies. Durkheim felt that it was the role not of the scientist but rather of the statesman to elaborate on the organizational details that would have to be attended to for a new net of corporate institutions to arise and, at least partly, to replace present administrative structures. But he had no doubt that the professional corporation was destined in the future to take a key position in the structure of modern societies as a vivifying source of new social norms and new social bonds.

Let me sum up: Durkheim was deeply convinced of the pathology of present-day acquisitive society. Yet he did not believe that the present pathological features could be traced to an inherent flaw in systems built on organic solidarity. Rather, he thought that the present malaise and anomie could be traced to transitional difficulties that could be overcome through the emergence of new norms and values in the institutional setting of a new corporate organization of industrial affairs. While the radical elements in Durkheim’s intellectual makeup had made him sensitive to the flaws in present industrial and class relations, his more conservative strands of thought led him to neglect the possibility that the disorders he witnessed were linked with the structure of capitalist society and not only with transitional phenomena. His liberal conscience, in turn, led him to reform proposals that, though they could perhaps not do away with what the Marxists considered built-in class conflicts, might yet so harmonize relations between employers and employees that adjustment within the framework of a new corporate society would replace the pathological strife of the present. Beholden to none of the political and social orientations of his day, Durkheim always attempted to look for a balanced middle way.

Durkheim was not opposed to the expanding role that the state plays in modern social life. But he was deeply concerned that an excessive growth of state power would eventually lead to the extinction of autonomous individuality that he prized above all. A society made up of an infinite scattering of disparate unorganized individuals, he argued, which an overgrown state attempts to limit and restrain, constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity (p. 27). Hence his attempt to envisage an institutional structure, equidistant from individuals and the tutelary state, that would allow the emergence of a full-blown cult of the individual while still re-creating partly atrophied bonds of complementarity and solidarity that would ensure cohesion in free societies.

This might be the place to move from an attempt to depict the major features of Durkheim’s argument to some critical comments. His discussion of the forced division of labor provides a good springboard for such critical commentary. A major flaw in Durkheim’s mode of argumentation is his tendency, as Steven Lukes has put it (Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, p. 177), to assume an identity between the normal, the ideal, and that which was about to happen. Even though he argued repeatedly that the normal was that found generally in a society, he refused to accept general social phenomena as normal if they went counter to his ideal moral demands and standards. That which he found repellent simply could not be normal. This is, perhaps, an admirable human sentiment, but it does no particular credit to Durkheim’s logical rigor or scientific stance. It was Renan who once proclaimed, "Il se pourrait que la vérité soit triste." This is a sentiment that Durkheim, with his buoyant, even if mainly rhetorical, optimism about the future, does not seem to have been able to entertain. What was distasteful could only be transitory and would surely be remedied in the none too distant future. In this respect Durkheim, writing in the fin de siècle that had for many already dispelled the Enlightenment certainties of their predecessors, still remained a true son of the Enlightenment tradition.

Turning now to a few other critical comments, a brief discussion of his use of anthropological and historical data seems in order. His deficiencies in this respect are glaring to the modern reader. Yet it has to be kept in mind that, especially in regard to simpler societies, scientific knowledge in Durkheim’s time was still in its infancy. It will not do to cultivate a sense of our own superiority over what seem to us elementary mistakes in Durkheim’s work. We know much more than Durkheim about these matters simply because we live almost a hundred years later. No modern anthropologist or sociologist will concur nowadays with Durkheim’s assertion that simpler societies lack restitutive sanctions. We have come to learn from Malinowski and his disciples that premodern societies rely to a large extent on reciprocal obligations—be it of individuals or of groups of individuals. Such societies are largely based on restitution whenever the reciprocal balances between the various forces of society are upset. Whether the rule be an eye for an eye or the return of another piece of cattle when one has been wrongfully appropriated, simple societies, contrary to Durkheim, seem in fact to be at least as devoted to the law of restitution as are modern societies.

In similar ways, Durkheim’s attempt to distinguish between types of societies along the axis of likeness versus complementarity fails to be satisfying if it is realized at the hand of new anthropological studies that Trobriand Islanders or natives of New Guinea differ in personal characteristics to a highly significant extent. But such a distinction has still much to recommend itself if, instead of making polar distinctions we limit ourselves to relative differences. It may be that the presence or absence of literacy in human groups may be a better distinguishing mark between them than the Durkheimian distinction (see Jack Goody, Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), yet it remains the case that later typological distinctions were in large part stimulated by Durkheim’s earlier effort.

Criticism of Durkheim has become in our days a minor cottage industry. I hence feel no need in this brief introduction unduly to extend my critical objections. To be sure, a variety of Durkheim’s findings, some of his major methodological assertions, and above all his frequent polemical exaggerations need to be rejected by contemporary scholarship. But this is as it should be if it is agreed that continuous attempts at refutation and correction mark the very nature of scientific discourse.

LEWIS COSER

I. In the following pages I am deeply in debt to the writings of Anthony Giddens on Durkheim, in particular his Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971) and his Durkheim (London, Fontana/Collins, 1978). I also owe a great deal to Steven Lukes’s Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (London, Allen Lane, 1973). Other, less extensive, debts are acknowledged in textual notes. Philippe Besnard and Anthony Giddens read an earlier version of this introduction and made many helpful suggestions for which I am grateful.

Introduction to This Edition

Steven Lukes

Durkheim’s The Division of Labor, his doctoral thesis, has been called sociology’s first classic (Tiryakian 1994, Lemert 1994, Müller 1994). The description is appropriate, for it displays several of a classic’s defining features. It confronts a range of fundamental issues, methodological, substantive, and normative—old issues that Durkheim treated in a new way. The treatment is bold, systematic, and inspired by a distinctive vision. Moreover key ideas in the book have survived decontextualization and transposition. Some remain usable and others worth contesting today. Much in the text, however, does not.¹ Unsurprisingly, it is, as Lewis Coser writes, susceptible to critical comments. He cites Durkheim’s optimism about the imminent remediability of society’s ills, the deficiencies of his anthropological and historical evidence, and his use of it in service of an untenable overarching dichotomy between types of society (seriously underestimating, for instance, the prevalence of restitution in premodern societies). He could have added criticism of Durkheim’s account of the causal mechanisms that purport to explain the growth of the division of labor, of the index thesis according to which the law is supposed to register the nature of social solidarity, of the inadequacy of his account of organic solidarity (a criticism Durkheim himself soon came to appreciate, leading him, as we shall see, to revise the account), and of much else besides. Here I shall follow Coser in setting all these failings aside, offering the reader a capacious footnote cataloging numerous extensive discussions of them.² There is also excessive use of analogies taken from biology (in place of argument and evidence), and there are polemics that led to exaggeration and appear dated, as does the occasional reference to assumptions that now look strikingly remote, as when Durkheim refers to skull measurements by Le Bon and Broca to suggest a correlation between anatomical and psychological similarities. Yet when all that is bracketed, what survives in the text is of compelling interest, continuing to animate and indeed renovate sociological thinking and research in various fields, and it is on this that the rest of this introduction will focus.

Methodological Critique

Here already we see in operation Durkheim’s so-called social realism—which was to be set out, and overstated, as a doctrine two years later in The Rules of Sociological Method. It consisted in a rejection of methodological individualism and, consequently, an effort to convey the reality of social facts—described in the Preface’s very first sentence as the facts of moral life—and the attempt to give them a distinctively sociological explanation.

We should begin by noting this early identification of the social and the moral and, in doing so, consider the perils of translation. For the French word "moral has the same meanings as the English word moral but carries an extra sense absent in English, a sense which contrasts with material and physical" and signifies what is mental and thus pertains to beliefs and sentiments (see Fields 2005: 174–75). That sense is what is important here, indicating that collective beliefs and sentiments—what he later came to call représentations collectives—were, from the beginning, the focus of Durkheim’s concerns, essential both to what explains and to what is to be explained. It is true that in The Division the morphological, or demographic, factors of population volume and density are claimed to be central to the causes and conditions of the developing division of labor, but the active factor, involving communication and commerce, is dynamic density, which is intersubjective.

What Durkheim rejects is the project of explaining the functioning of the division of labor and the causal conditions of its growth in purely individualist terms. He took this to be the project of Herbert Spencer, the most frequently cited thinker in the book. Spencer viewed social institutions and structures in general as aggregate results of the desires of individuals who are severally seeking satisfaction (cited in Peel 1971: 213) and, in particular, accounted, in Durkheim’s words, for the division of labor in industrial societies as consisting of a cooperation that is automatically produced by the fact that each person pursues his own interest (158). This was an instance of the error Durkheim attributed to the Utilitarians, namely their conception of the genesis of society. They supposed that

originally there were isolated and independent individuals who thus could enter into relationships with one another only in order to cooperate, for they had no other reason to bridge the empty gap separating them, and to associate together. But this theory, which is so widely held, postulates a veritable creation ex nihilo . . . Collective life did not arise from individual life; on the contrary, it is the latter that emerged from the former. (217–18)

This important truth led Durkheim to criticize a view that is still widespread and resurgently powerful today as an ideology, namely what has been called the illusion of free markets (Harcourt 2011). Markets, on this view, are seen as consisting in a purely economic relationship freed from all regulation, and as it emerges from the entirely free initiative of the parties concerned (160). As he wrote elsewhere, liberty is the fruit of regulation (Durkheim 1961: 54). This led to his insight that in a contract not everything is contractual: to be valid voluntary contracts are submitted to a regulatory force that is imposed by society and not by individuals: it is a force that becomes ever more weighty and complex (165–66). Market exchange and the division of labor, if they are to stabilize over time, clearly require a degree of trust, institutional guarantees, and regulation, though Durkheim overstates the case in claiming that they require an inclusive moral community, for, as Max Weber noted, the market is a relationship which transcends the boundaries of neighborhood, kinship, group, or tribe (Weber 1968: 637). Nor did Durkheim allow for the role of powerful dominant interests in shaping the normative background of markets. Rather he assumed that background to be the not-yet-established but normal and emergent condition of late nineteenth-century capitalism, as opposed to the pathological and abnormal forms prevalent in his time.

There is a further methodological insight to be discerned in Durkheim’s rejection of the classical explanation of political economy: that the need for happiness impels the individual to specialize more and more (184). For the need for greater happiness to be able to account for the division of labor, he wrote, it would be necessary for it also to be the cause of changes that have come about progressively in human nature. We are in error when we compare the happiness of our forefathers with our own, for we

reason as if all our pleasures must have been theirs also . . . if they underwent so much agony so as to increase the productive capacity of labor it was not to acquire possessions of no value to them. To appreciate them they would first have had to acquire tastes and habits that they did not have, that is, to change their nature. (188)

In short, Durkheim is here pointing to the need for a sociological account of the formation of preferences—of the acquisition of tastes and habits. This is an issue typically unaddressed by economists to this day, for whom, in Gary Becker’s words, preferences, defined over fundamental aspects of life, such as health, prestige, sensual pleasure, benevolence or envy are assumed not to change substantially over time, nor to be very different between wealthy and poor persons, or even between different persons in different societies and cultures (Becker 1986: 110). As Dietrich Rueschemeyer observes, this assumption, together with the further postulate that there is little or no change across contexts in the relative importance of different preferences, patently is a not very realistic premise (Rueschemeyer 1994: 61).

Solidarity

In his first lecture course, entitled Social Solidarity, Durkheim asked, What are the bonds which unite men one with another? (Durkheim 1888), and in a letter to his colleague Célestin Bouglé he wrote that the very object of sociology as a whole is to determine the conditions for the conservation of societies (Lukes 1972: 139). Of course, social solidarity cannot be directly observed, nor can its extent be measured; hence the need for an external index, which in The Division is provided by the law, on the assumption that the relative proportion of restitutive law in a society registers the extent of specialization of labor and thus, he further assumed, the extent of the organic type of solidarity. But what are we to make of the distinction, famously and memorably set out in The Division but abandoned by Durkheim thereafter, between mechanical and organic solidarity?

First, the nomenclature. This was purposely counterintuitive. Durkheim was clearly seeking to challenge the typical attribution, especially among German thinkers, of organic metaphors to an idealized past and of mechanical metaphors to modernity. He had previously reviewed Ferdinand Tönnies’s book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, commenting that the latter for Tönnies was "a mechanical aggregate; the only true collective life that